A pontificate remembered for two disasters also produced several things of long consequence, which is the reason it is worth reading beyond the headline.
He confirmed the Capuchin reform in 1528, approving a stricter Franciscan observance that became one of the most effective preaching orders of the Catholic Reformation, and he did so against sustained opposition from the existing Franciscan leadership.
In 1533 he commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, a decision confirmed by his successor and executed after his death.
In the same year he received an explanation of the heliocentric hypothesis in the Vatican gardens from a papal secretary who had learned it from Copernicus's circulating summary. The account is documented, and the pope's reaction was interest rather than alarm; the secretary was given a valuable manuscript as a reward. Copernicus's own book, published nine years later, carried a dedication to a subsequent pope, and the condemnation of the theory did not come for another seventy years.
Also in 1533 he presided at the marriage of his young kinswoman Catherine de' Medici to the second son of the king of France, who unexpectedly became Henry II. That marriage put a Medici at the centre of French politics for four decades, through the wars of religion.
What he did not do was call a general council to address the reform demands that had been accumulating since before his election. He feared what a council might do to papal authority. His successor called one, at Trent, eleven years after his death.